IE fails to find URLs after a minute

OS: Win98SE; IE6 Sp1 (latest)

Problem:

Last night I went to an airline site, registered there, my system
froze, had to do a hard shutdown.

I rebooted, ran scandisk, scanreg, cleaned all temp folders/files, including
index,
loaded on a new program from that site, the system went down again.

(Earlier I had trouble with my printer & system crashes. After several
reboots
and cycling of the printer, they cleared up.)

I rebooted, Uninstalled the new software. Took system down, back up,
all seemed ok.

went to bed.

Today, after about 30 seconds of Internet connectivity and all ok,
any attempt to go to a new url fails. (cached urls are fine, but
going off site, kills it.)

After a long time-out, I get "unable to find server" error.

Going to the command screen, I can ping, locally and I have
internet access. So connection seems to be working?

IPCONFIG shows I have gateway access, DHCP,
no WINS (get that from ISP), lease valid.

Things I have done:

cleaned all temp folders/files, including index, MRUs, checked
for BHOs, ran hiJack this, checked for virus,spyware.

1) Power cycled modem
2) Reinstalled all TCP/IP settings, drivers, MS client, network adapters and
and bound nic to tcp/ip.
3) downloaded, reinstalled IE6.1 Sp1.
**still failed
4) installed different LAN card, drivers, tcp/ip
5) repeated all checks from #1
** still fails

Any ideas?
Bob